Some adore green peas, some cannot stand even the thought of them. Where do you stand on the green pea issue and if you are among those who enjoy them, favorite dishes and/or recipes please. And please, your comments on fresh versus frozen…….

I've taken to growing them in the last couple of years, just 3-4 plants so don't get many peas off each year. For this tiny volume I find they're great ingredients to pasta dishes, which allows the (pea's) flavour the chance to show.

One of the vegetables I most adore. When truly young I'll eat them raw in their shells. When slightly more mature, removed from the shells and eaten raw. As to cooking, a nearly infinite set of possibilities......steamed with nothing more than a bit of butter and salt, into puree, for soups, seasoned with saffron, in minestrone or uppa d'Acqua Cotta, together with olive oil finely chopped spinach, olive oil and garlic as a pasta sauce.

And, of course, as part of the preparation of tournedos Choron, consomme Brunoise and Genoise risotto.

I have loved green peas ever since I first grew them as a five year old farm boy -- my best job was driving a truck between the giant rollers that shelled them to the factory that packed them. The boxes weighed 80 pounds and the fresh pea smell was intoxicating.

Absolutely fresh peas are heavenly, but very hard to find in quality over the growing season. Some of the newer varieties are bred for beautiful albeit inedible shells to sucker the consumer into buying them in hot weather. The grow best below 70F at the hottest part of the day.

Luckily, frozen peas are only marginally less heavenly -- they are picked and packed at the very peak of their season, and the modern fast freezing techniques are superb. Canned peas are a distant third, edible but only a little better than that.

I like them in many variations, but this recipe from Andrea Immer Robinson is outstanding. She was peddling a 2003 Gary Farrell Russian River Pinot Noir for $34 -- I was a satisfied peddlee -- but the recipe endures in our house:

Cook the pasta in lots of boiling salted water according to package directions. While the pasta iscooking heat the butter in a skillet on medium high until it foams. Add the shallot, reduce theheat to medium-low and cook until it starts to soften. Add the peas and, with tongs, put thecooked pasta directly into the skillet so that some of the water clinging to it goes into the skillet.Add the prosciutto, olive oil, salt and pepper and parsley and mix with tongs to blend well.Remove from the heat and taste, adding more salt, pepper and oil if desired. Serve immediatelywith grated cheese if desired.

I must say that this "green stuff" is something I really dislike. Pea soup, made of dried peas, is very common food in Finland, and unfortunately we had that too often at school when I was a child. It was something that I could not eat then, and simply won't eat these days either.

Could I refer to you the annual pea-throwing championship which this year took place on 12 July in Sussex. You take a green pea, place it at the end of a small tube, place the other end of the tube in your mouth and blow. The world record is 38.7 metres.

Hated peas when I was a child: only came to enjoy them as I grew up. Do you think that pea-eating can be used as a rite of passage? To be more accurate, I hated cooked peas, and liked them raw. I enjoyed going out into the pea paddock with my father, picking buckets full of fat green pea pods, and eating as many as I liked while I picked.

Frozen peas are fine - I'm with you, Bob! - my favourite way to prepare them is to put the frozen peas into a small casserole dish with a tight fitting lid, with a tablespoonful of water and a blob of butter, put the lid on and put them in the oven with the roast or casserole you are cooking. Leave them for about half an hour to 40 minutes, never lifting the lid till you take them out.

I must confess to liking tinned peas. Probably makes me a philistine ... one of many things that make me one. Tinned peas are correctly eaten cold, as part of a cold collation that also should contain slices of pickled beetroot and a scoop of potato salad.

Whatever one says with re canned (tinned if some prefer) peas, corn or carrots ... among the very best foods in the world when you are on manoeuvres in the army. Open can, dig in with a spoon, feast and forget the battle for a moment or two.

Daniel Rogov wrote:Whatever one says with re canned (tinned if some prefer) peas, corn or carrots ... among the very best foods in the world when you are on manoeuvres in the army. Open can, dig in with a spoon, feast and forget the battle for a moment or two.

BestRogov

I think I'd prefer an MRE . . . .

"The sun, with all those planets revolving about it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else to do"Galileo Galilei

(avatar: me next to the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory)

The peas I actually like are the ones where you eat the pod: snow peas or snap peas.

I like the frozen ones well enough, but when I was in Weight Watchers, peas counted as a starch, and there was no way I was going to use my starch allotment on peas when I could be eating corn or potatoes or bread.

Bob Ross wrote:I like them in many variations, but this recipe from Andrea Immer Robinson is outstanding. She was peddling a 2003 Gary Farrell Russian River Pinot Noir for $34 -- I was a satisfied peddlee -- but the recipe endures in our house:

Cook the pasta in lots of boiling salted water according to package directions. While the pasta iscooking heat the butter in a skillet on medium high until it foams. Add the shallot, reduce theheat to medium-low and cook until it starts to soften. Add the peas and, with tongs, put thecooked pasta directly into the skillet so that some of the water clinging to it goes into the skillet.Add the prosciutto, olive oil, salt and pepper and parsley and mix with tongs to blend well.Remove from the heat and taste, adding more salt, pepper and oil if desired. Serve immediatelywith grated cheese if desired.

On any given day in any Soviet restaurant, in my days, you could find mashed potato and green peas together on a menu. It was most common side dish ever. I would never touch the green peas; I hated them in that form. However I love them in soup and in salads. Go figure. So witch one should I vote then?

When I was in middle school and doing Phishhead carvavaning with my older brother in the Midwest, we stayed over a college friend of his and the mother made some outstanding 7-layer [Summer?] Salad. It has a full layor of delicioius peas, and I always think about eating this but haven't seen it ever again. Does anyone have a recipe for this salad?